A Daughter’s Tale

The late painter Lucian Freud had a constant cavalcade of beautiful, rich, sometimes teenaged lovers, his sexual appetites fueling controversial and charged portraits now worth millions of pounds. But he was censorious with his children, once likening his daughter to “a prostitute” for smoking a cigarette outside. His complex relationship with daughter Annie was tested when he painted her nude in 1963; she was just 14 years old. In a selection from Breakfast with Lucian: The Astounding Life and Outrageous Times of Britain’s Great Modern Painter, Freud’s memoirist Geordie Grieg recalls the artist’s paternal demons.

The public was fascinated by Lucian’s portraits of his sons and daughters, some of which were naked portraits. Journalists had a field day trying to explain the Freudian significance of children in their teens or early adulthood stripping bare for their father. His 14 offspring included a novelist, a Biro artist, a fashion designer, a journalist, a drugs adviser, a poet, and a sculptor. They rarely mixed, however. His four children by Suzy Boyt, a student he met at the Slade in the 1950s, and two by the writer, bohemian traveler, and gardener Bernardine Coverley, were the main exception to this rule. Some were only vaguely aware of each other’s existence even after Lucian died. Some still do not know of at least one of their half-siblings.

Over the years there were splits and spats, tight alliances and silent stand-offs, shared intimacies and dramatic events. His charm was magical, even hypnotic, and they all fell under his spell. He had a playfulness alongside the steel core of ambition. He always lived well. He may have at times been buried by debt, but he was never tight.

He was the central focus of his family’s attention, deciding when he saw his children or not. Few had his telephone number. With the exception of the four children by Katherine McAdam, he did, however, paint all his acknowledged children. He painted their faces, in family groups, lying in bed with friends, holding their own children, and, most controversially of all, in the case of six daughters and one son, naked.

The first of these was in 1963, when Lucian asked Annie Freud, his eldest daughter, aged 14, to remove all her clothes and teenage inhibitions for a nude portrait. It was certainly risqué to use as a naked model a somewhat innocent and naïve teenager. This was a momentous and controversial event in Annie’s life. Many felt it was reprehensible, if not downright immoral. Lucian did not care. The question of whether it would damage his daughter simply did not occur to him.

On a worn sofa in his studio in Clarendon Crescent in Paddington, Annie perched with her leg jack-knifed into a position of protective modesty. In Naked Child Laughing she displays hints of emerging sexuality combined with gleeful innocence. It is a study in vulnerability and teenage allure, with her wild grin of spontaneous mirth. A good subject for any artist, but one with psychological edge, questioning the line between appropriate and inappropriate behavior by a father toward his pubescent daughter.

It was the first full-body nude that Lucian ever painted, and it caught a moment of intimacy and trust between them. “We actually had a wonderful time; it is the picture of me by Dad that I most admire,” Annie said to me. He knew that nudity changed everything, bringing new levels of revelation and exposure. Or as he once put it, “I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.”

At the time, Annie could not articulate very clearly how she felt but later said that she could feel the collective prudish culture of Britain breathing down her neck, as well as being embarrassed since her boyfriend and her mother, both not unreasonably, felt that it was not right for her to pose naked. Analysis of what had occurred seemed beyond a 14-year-old’s emotional grasp and understanding.

“I knew that some people felt what I did with my father was dangerous and inappropriate. But my dad felt it was all right and whatever he did at that time I felt was a hundred percent O.K. It was somehow forbidden and experimental, but there was nothing sexual or inappropriate in what happened. There was some hurt done, not intentionally, and it was nothing to do with sex—perhaps it was more an intrusion into innocence. Being naked in front of your father certainly went against the tide of opinion at the time. It was all very well for Dad to say it was all right. No one else felt it was,” she said.

Annie’s mother, Kitty Garman, by then divorced from Lucian, was alarmed. “When I was sitting, a letter arrived from Mum which he opened and then howled with laughter. In it she said that her father would have felt that it wasn’t right for Dad to paint nudes of me, and how it might make me unhappy. Dad thought that was terribly, terribly funny,” said Annie.

Lucian said that “Ep [Kitty’s father, Jacob Epstein] would turn in his grave if he knew about Kitty’s letter,” as Epstein had himself aroused hostility many years earlier by also challenging taboos surrounding the depiction of sexuality. Lucian argued that nakedness was simply a way to get to a more truthful portrait, scoffing at any suggestion that to paint his own children was in any way taboo—and of course he liked risk and never cared what others thought. Opposition always made him dig his heels in.

It was of little comfort to Kitty to have Lucian sneer that her own father would have swept aside any of her protective maternal instincts concerning their child’s exposure. “Lucian just thought that my grandfather would regard Mum as ridiculous over all that. He howled with laughter, which was difficult for me to handle,” said Annie. “It is awful when any parents say unpleasant or disparaging things about each other,” she added.

Lucian simply did not engage with Annie or her mother about how the painting affected them. He was interested only in what worked for him as an artist; those around him, the people in his life, were whom he wanted to paint. He had an artist’s objective view of nudity, having often painted naked models in life classes. He saw objections as bourgeois, the fruit of people’s own twisted minds. He was simply pursuing an artist’s license to portray people in a way that mattered. That the subject happened to be his own teenage daughter and that she was naked was no one else’s business.

The picture was the starting point for a career defined by his naked portraits. He created his own language with paint through prolonged observation of people. “I’m really interested in them as animals. Part of liking to work from them naked is for that reason. Because I can see more: see the forms repeating right through the body and often in the head as well. One of the most exciting things is seeing through the skin, to the blood and veins and markings,” he explained.

In his picture of Annie, Lucian used paint with a new confidence; he used expressive, looser brushstrokes to paint Annie’s arm, wrist, knuckle, and breast, conjuring up her gamine essence and most memorably her slightly expressive out-of-control rip of laughter. He used a shorthand of marks in paint, daubs, and strokes, and so became freed from his previous rigid sense of control. Risk was implicit in the style, subject matter, and context. His skill had deepened to make his images more pliable and responsive. He told Francis Bacon his paintings had not previously reflected feelings through the way he painted, which was why he welcomed this more expansive, bolder, and looser style.

Although Annie said that on the one hand that they had a wonderful time, other memories of sitting for her father tell a more complex story, and sometimes “it was not easy. I remember having long hair and wanting my hair to cover my nipples, and Dad would lean forward and move my hair away with his paintbrush.”

G.G.: “To expose the nipples?”

A.F.:“Yes, and not because of any sexual impropriety or forbidden eroticism . . . This is something I have talked about with my sisters. You would think it would have a bad effect on your feelings, your sexual feelings or your body feelings, but it didn’t. There wasn’t any question in my mind of a lack of trust of Dad. It did involve me requiring a particular strength: it was full exposure. The issue was about someone having dominion over you. It was all quite shocking.”

It was a childhood beset by many emotional explosions. Annie would find hate letters lying around his studio that Lucian was about to send, “saying the most critical things he could think of to say about somebody he had been in love with, intricate things about their dishonesty, vileness, or beastliness.” Annie was aware throughout her childhood of unresolved conflict. Her mother had become pregnant with her sister Annabel “to bring dad to his senses, not a nice thing to do.” It was to no avail.

Lucian’s ever roving eye had an upsetting effect on Annie. “There were many experiences of meeting his girlfriends, becoming besotted with them, and then I would never see them again,” she remembered. To her delight, from the 1960s onward the beautiful and loyal Jane Willoughby would float back and forth into Lucian’s life. “Above all the other women, Jane had a huge basic sanity, perhaps to do with her class. She is different from most people and more sanguine. She was not like, ‘Oh, he’s hurt me and then he went and met someone else.’ Nothing could stop his great feelings of respect for her.”

Lucian stained not only others’ memories with his moods, voice, and opinions but also the rooms where he lived and worked. “The bedroom was knee-deep in dirty clothes, letters, bills, checks, books, paint, personal objects, works of art. Dad was a manic buyer. He shopped and he shopped and he shopped. Boer War bedspreads, for instance, made by English prisoners of war using old pieces of their uniform. They were often in poor condition, with threads unraveling, but he piled them up. The stairway had no steps visible—the newspapers were like a kind of river, piled up deep,” Annie recalled.

She wrote a poem called “The Ballad of Dirty Del,” which described his scruffy bohemian existence in Delamere Terrace. It seemed to be simply part of his nature; part of him needed a sense of decay, and of course he was dealing with flesh, its immediacy and how it was fleeting and temporal. “It was simply a fact of my life, all the chaos: food, pans of oil in which chips had been fried. I accepted it because it was part of my dad, who I loved absolutely and completely. I adored him. My mother was worried my poem showed a lack of respect, but yet she used to tell me harsh things about him. It was all confusing.”

Her father’s relentless work schedule and his way of life affected his health. “He would complain about awful boils on his bum. Work, relentlessly pursued, took a terrible toll on top of endless love affairs going wrong, lack of money, terrifying gambling debts, conflicts with galleries, and the odd fight,” said Annie. Despite this, he insisted that his daughters should have beautiful manners. “We used to go to see his friends for lunch, often in very grand houses or amazing restaurants, and he wanted me to hold out my hand to our hosts and say, ‘Thank you for a lovely lunch. That was delicious.’ He wanted me to be the politest English girl, not muttering ‘thanks’ but clearly saying, ‘Thank you. That was really lovely.’ He used to stand behind me jabbing me with his fingers to make sure I did it properly.”

When Lucian caught Annie smoking outside, he was cross. “He told me that prostitutes smoked in the street and wanted me to know that if I did it again I could be regarded as a prostitute.” He asked if she knew why he was being so adamant. “I replied, ‘Because you are my father,’ and he said, ‘That’s completely irrelevant. It is because I care about you.’ I found that statement of objectivity incredibly hard to bear. I wanted his love because of the nature of our relationship, not because of his feelings. I probably cried, certainly inwardly. I found that so hard because he is my father, that is what he meant to me. Everything he said, did, the way he looked, the way he behaved, his friendships and his paintings, everything was the fact that I came from him. I was of his blood. That is what mattered.”

Annie identified with him, almost obsessively. “We looked alike. We even sounded alike in the way he slightly rolled his *R’*s in words like ‘free’ or ‘restaurant.’ And I loved his assertions . . . how he would say, ‘I take bribes but they never influence my judgment: that’s true incorruptibility.’ I was 100 percent part of him.”

That closeness was to be shattered in 1975, when Annie was 27 years old, and she discovered that Lucian had fathered other children. It had never crossed her mind that she and her younger sister, Annabel, might have other siblings. At Wheeler’s in Old Compton Street in Soho where Annie had gone to meet Lucian, a young man stretched his hand across the table and said: “I am your long lost baby brother, Ali.” He was one of four children Lucian had fathered with Suzy Boyt. At lunch nothing further was discussed. She had no idea that her father had at that time at least seven other children. He had hidden this from her, which left her feeling betrayed, depressed, and astounded. “I simply didn’t know about Ali, Rose, Susie, Ib, Bella, or Esther at all—none of them. I had no idea that they existed. Or who their mothers were. Not the slightest idea. At the time, I hadn’t understood that you can be, indeed that you have the right to be, angry with your parents, so I felt that I couldn’t be angry, either. I had been brought up to think that whatever Dad did was perfect,” Annie said.

The discovery of secret siblings was disturbing enough, but even more so was the fact that they all appeared to know about each other and about her and Annabel. “I then started to assume that almost anybody I met was a child of Dad’s. Even if I met someone with an Australian accent, I wondered if it was some brother or sister of mine,” she said. It provided the key to the door of his many secret lives. “I had no way of acknowledging my feelings of betrayal until later on when I had a nervous breakdown.”

His children were hungry for his attention. Sitting for him was really the only guarantee of seeing him. During her pregnancy in 1975, Annie returned to England and Lucian painted her with Alice Weldon, a young American artist. He was as addictive and mesmerizing to his children as he was to others, and Annie also confirmed the physical conflict on which he claimed to thrive: “Dad used to hit taxi drivers and punched people in the street if he didn’t like the look of them. Sometimes he had cut marks on his face. He might have made a pass at someone’s girlfriend or something. When he was restless he would go round cursing and somebody would take a swipe at him. He was very odd,” said Annie.

Although he had never been a predictable father, Annie was jolted when Lucian was no longer the father figure solely for her and Annabel. He was suddenly someone who cared for other children besides them, or, even worse, simply didn’t take his paternal responsibilities as seriously.

“Somehow the person I thought I had as my dad was no longer the person I had known. I was anchorless. Dad had brought me up to be fantastically correct and polite, but then in the 1970s, he was suddenly buying into punk, where you had to be as rude as possible. What was all that bloody well about?” said Annie.

They clashed in 1981 just before he started Large Interior, London W11 (After Watteau), the hugely ambitious painting based on the 18th-century rococo painter’s picture of four figures in an imagined garden playfully listening to music. Lucian asked Annie if her daughter May would sit as one of the figures. Annie was nervous about the idea, as she knew that Lucian’s sittings were long and arduous. The day before the painting was due to be started, Annie and May were harassed by some youths on the Tube. “I was angry, but Dad told me not to talk about it in front of May because I might frighten her. And I thought, Right, right. That’s it. This is too much.” The next day Annie told her father she had changed her mind and that May would not be in the picture. He was furious and immediately told her to leave. “It was the worst mistake of my life because we forever lost our intimacy. I did try with a huge amount of effort to rebuild our closeness, but it could never be remade.” (The picture shows Celia Paul, Bella Freud, Kai Boyt, Suzy Boyt, and a child called Star, the daughter of a girlfriend of Ali Boyt’s.)

Annie wrote letters asking forgiveness. “I was very frightened of him after that. I had lost my way with him. If I told him I was writing poems, he wouldn’t say anything. It was just terrible.” For five years they did not see each other. “It was like suffering an assault for being a mother,” she said. She survived as a poorly paid secretary and started a relationship with another woman who helped her to bring up May. When she did meet Lucian again, it was at awkward, stiff lunches where hardly anything was said. “He would write to me saying I mustn’t go on about being so sorry about the past and that everything was fine. I stopped writing eventually as everything got back to an even enough keel, but at a huge cost.”

But it was not the same. For instance, Annie was never given her father’s telephone number, although some of his other children had it. “It was very upsetting. It really screwed me up for a long time,” she said.